Rowayton body ID'd through prints

Published 7:00 pm, Tuesday, November 7, 2006

NORWALK -- The body of a young woman found washed up inside a bag Sunday in a Rowayton marsh has been identified as 21-year-old Noel Senerchia of Bridgeport.

Senerchia's close friend Alicia Gonzalez, also of Bridgeport, said Friday that she suspects foul play, saying she believes her friend met an untimely end because she got in with the wrong crowd and started using drugs.

"Do I think that she overdosed? No. I think somebody did this to her," Gonzalez, 26, told The Hour during a tearful telephone interview Friday evening. "She's got three kids, those kids don't have a mother anymore. How could somebody do that?"

Senerchia moved with her family from Darien, where she grew up, to Milford in her teens, and later to Bridgeport, Gonzalez said, telling how the two had known each other since Senerchia was about 16.

According to the Bridgeport Detective Bureau, the young woman was reported missing Wednesday, three days after the discovery of her body and one day before Norwalk police said they had a positive identification from the medical examiner's office in Farmington.

The office identified the body through partial fingerprints lifted during a Tuesday autopsy, said Lt. Ernest Vitarbo, head of the Norwalk Detective Bureau.

Police are treating Senerchia's death, as they typically do all suspicious deaths, as a homicide until they learn otherwise, he said.

Gonzalez asserted, sobbing, that her friend didn't deserve to die.

"Noel was a good person she just got messed up, you know, into the wrong drugs, the wrong people. She loved her kids. Boy, regardless of anything she always loved her kids. She has a five-year-old boy that just started school and she has two girls, two baby girls. I have three children and she's been there for all three of my children. She would do anything for anybody."

Senerchia's girls are about 18 months and two years old, she said.

Who will take care of these children? "Me and her family are working on that."

Senerchia is also survived by both parents, who live in Bridgeport, a pregnant 20-year-old sister and a teenage brother, Gonzalez said.

About five feet tall and 100 pounds, Senerchia was white with reddish-brown hair and had friends in Norwalk, police said.

Her immediate family has been notified, but "we have not had the opportunity to speak to all the family members and acquaintances and friends that we want to," Vitarbo said Friday, adding that he expects to have done so by Monday.

Norwalk detectives are working to track down those who could give insight into her last days of life, he said.

Detectives are "trying to retrace her steps for the last week -- you know, the days before she was found," Vitarbo said, adding that they would go as far back as necessary to solve the case, whether it be weeks or days.

Senerchia's body was found behind a Nearwater Road home in the exclusive Pine Point neighborhood, listed on the real estate market at nearly $5 million, by a resident who was cleaning debris after tropical storm Ernesto.

Police believe her body was washed up in the strong currents and winds of the storm, which hit the region Saturday.

After contacting police all along the Eastern seaboard, Norwalk detectives said they received word from Bridgeport police Wednesday morning reporting Senerchia as a missing person who fit the body description.

There is still no official word on the cause of her death or how long she'd been dead, and a toxicological autopsy of her body that police hope will reveal more is anticipated to take several weeks to complete.

Gonzalez said she learned of her friend's demise Wednesday morning.

"It was kind of a funny thing because she hadn't been around in a couple days and that's not like her. We were close, she lived with me, I lived with her. I loved that girl. I would always try to ... lead her in the right way. It's tragic, she's the first death in the family."